Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
--
Letter (19 December 1935) as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, (No. 336)Wallace Stevens
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It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.
Boris Pasternak
His temperament was that of a Prophet — a God-possessed man, brother to Dostoevski, and teeming with the future, a future he bore within him as the Hebrew prophets bore within them the coming of the Messiah, and as he bore within himself the past.
Rembrandt
Poetry has historically been allied with religion and morals; it has served the purpose of penetrating the mysterious depths of things. It has had an enormous patriotic value. Homer to the Greeks was a Bible, a textbook of morals, a history, and a national inspiration. In any case, it may be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in its leisure, has something the matter with it — or else the poetry is artificial poetry.
John Dewey
The trouble with tea is that originally it was quite a good drink. So a group of the most eminent British scientists put their heads together, and made complicated biological experiments to find a way of spoiling it. To the eternal glory of British science their labour bore fruit.
George Mikes
Duly twice a morning
Would I be sprinkling it with fountain-water.
At last it grew, and grew, and bore, and bore,
Till at the length
It grew a gallows, and did bear our son,
It bore thy fruit and mine: O wicked, wicked plant.Thomas Kyd
Stevens, Wallace
Stevenson, Adlai
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